Stoner on first Ducati laps: ‘I’ve made a huge mistake!’

On paper, Casey Stoner and the Ducati Desmosedici were a match made in heaven during the 2007 MotoGP season.

06 Mar 2023

The young Australian had switched to the Italian factory for his second year in the premier-class and promptly won his very first race for the team.

It was to be the first of ten wins and 14 podiums that swept Stoner to Ducati’s first MotoGP crown.

But the #27 has revealed his first impressions of the new 800cc machine were far from positive.

“It looked a lot better on paper, in the results, than it felt to us,” Stoner told MotoGP.com, when reflecting on 2007 for ‘MotoGP Stories: The Resurrection of Ducati' .

“When I signed for Ducati, it was very exciting. Going to a factory team. But after my first laps on the bike, my thought was: ‘What have I done? I’ve made a huge mistake!’"

The reason the GP7 was so difficult to ride lay in the ‘extreme’ design approach taken by Ducati for the new era of 800cc engines, which was in stark contrast to the smooth, corner-speed concept chosen by its Japanese rivals.

“That year, our bike was very, very difficult to ride. It was an extreme bike because of an extreme engine,” said Stoner's crew chief Cristian Gabarrini.

Stoner added: “A lot of people thought: ‘800cc will make these bikes handle very good’. Especially the Japanese manufacturers said: ‘We want a light bike, something that turns very nicely’.

“Ducati went in completely the other direction and said: ‘We don’t really care about the chassis at the moment, let’s try and make it go quick on the straight!’

“We were fighting all year trying to get the bike to turn.”

Experienced team-mate Loris Capirossi, who had been the top Ducati rider in all four of the team's previous (990cc) MotoGP seasons, said: “It looked like Casey was born for that bike. For me, that bike had many problems.”

Capirossi took only one race win that year on his way to seventh in the world championship and promptly left for Suzuki.

It was perhaps a wise choice, with Ducati engineers admitting the Desmosedici remained 'too aggressive' and 'difficult to control' in 2008 and 2009.

“We didn’t have any budget so the bike we started the year with is the exact same bike that we finished with. We didn’t get new chassis, new parts, a new engine. Nothing,” Stoner revealed.

“Quite often we were the only Ducati running at the front, the only Ducati with a chance of the podium. So I felt the weight of the whole company, everybody, on my shoulders.”

Stoner still won another 13 races from 2008-2010, after which he left to join Repsol Honda and promptly sealed a second MotoGP title before retiring at the end of 2012.

“We were not close enough to him,” Ducati CEO Claudio Domenicali said of Stoner’s exit, which was partly caused by a lack of support as he struggled with what was eventually diagnosed as lactose intolerance.

“We made some mistakes at that time. It’s mainly our responsibility. When Casey left, we understood that we had a big problem [with the bike].”

Ducati didn’t win another race until several years into the Gigi Dall’Igna era, with Andrea Iannone, at the Red Bull Ring in 2016.

After finishing title runner-up with Andrea Dovizioso from 2017-2019, Ducati finally won its first MotoGP title since Stoner with Francesco Bagnaia last season.